California's weird election

I see now that Gray Davis now has to go through a recall election. The laws of California say that all you need to run for Governor is to be a resident of California, pay $3,500, and get 65 signatures. A K2 person can easily run for Governor. (K2 means that the person knows or is known by between 31 and 316 people; the notation is logarithmic and is explained in "Logarithms keep Doc Brown in Perspective"). Most of us are K3 (between 316 and 3,162 people), so most of us could run for governor, and a lot of people are. I hear that there are 352 candidates for governor now, and the number is likely to rise. Arnold Schwarzenegger, Arianna Huffington, and Larry Flynt are among the candidates. So also is Bridget O'Reilly, who has been unemployed for three years and thinks of this as another job she is trying to get. She will get fame and notice out of this, and that may help her to get another job.

But with so many candidates, we could wind up with a winner with only 5.2% of the vote, say, but leading all the 351 others by a wide margin. And perhaps those 5.2% are a fringe group that the other 94.8% don't believe in at all. You get one of those as governor and almost everyone will be unhappy. So this could get wild. If they are going to do this, they need a runoff election, or several runoff elections, to eliminate the fringes and get at the candidates that are rated in the top 10% or so by everyone.

This may even hurt Bush's chances of getting reelected next year. I thought at first of an Arnold Schwarzenegger challenge to the Republican Party's nomination of Bush, but he is foreign-born. Still, this could be a place where people voice their discontent, and maybe a governor will be elected who will be emboldened by this either to challenge Bush for the Republican nomination or run as a third-party. If either of these succeed, Bush loses a Lichtman key and perhaps the election.

Googlisms

Recently I found out about a googly type site on the Internet. It is Googlisms. No, this is not Google&tm;. It is a site set up by an Australian in which you type in a name, click a radio button labeled "who", "where", "what", or "when", and submit, and the result is a list of quotes from the Internet concerning the name you submitted. For example, if you submit "bill gates", you get things like "bill gates is satan conspiracy theory", "bill gates is the pope" and so forth. So I experimented with it. I submitted my name and got nothing. I submitted the names of some people I know, and I got some items on some of them. I then tried dates and organizations such as the Astronomical League and got lists of items describing them. I tried "blogtrek" and got "blogtrek is getting out". I don't want to see that. I looked "blogtrek is getting out" in Google and got one of my previous pages in which I find that other bloggers are listing a link to my Blogtrek. I wrote "I am glad to see that word of Blogtrek is getting out." As you can see, Googlisms took that phrase right out of context. That is not what I meant at all. I found an even more egregious case when I looked up "toastmasters". I got "toastmasters is only for professional speakers". Whaaa?? The whole purpose of Toastmasters is to give people new to public speaking or afraid of it a chance to get better with speaking. It is not just for professional speakers. I looked up the phrase in Google and got from the site http://www.portlandtn.com/toastmasters.htm the quote "Some might think Toastmasters is solely for professional speakers. It is not. Toastmasters come from a variety of occupations and backgrounds.". By taking the phrase out of context, Googlisms completely reversed the meaning of this quote!

I did some more "googlisming" and concluded that it looks for your search term plus "is" (not "are", not "was"; if you try a plural noun, you may not get any hits) plus a phrase that lasts until something other than a letter, number, sharp, or space is found. No wonder we get out-of-context returns. "of" phrases can easily change radically in meaning: "A daughter of Mary is a kindergartener." to kindergarten together" becomes "Mary is a kindergartener." Googlisms will make the mother go to school too.

Therefore I consider this site dangerous. Using "is" as your verb is said to be bad form, and it does not occur that often. Therefore, most of the people I know get no hits, even though they occur frequently on the Web. You now have to be careful how you use "is" because Googlism will pick it up and chop your sentence to pieces. Googlisms may be fun, but don't take it too seriously. Take everything in context.

The Mystery Man of Carly Simon

I heard in a news story yesterday; for example, in USA Today, that Carly Simon sold at an auction for $50,000 the identity of the mystery man in the song You're So Vain. The winner of the auction had to promise Carly that he would never give away the identity of the vain man. Lots of legends have built over the 30 years since the song came out about just who this vain man with the apricot scarf was. Some say it was Warren Beatty, others Cat Stevens, and Kris Kristofferson and Mick Jagger have been mentioned as well.

The song is interesting in many respects, and it is somewhat vain itself and certainly it contradicts itself, rather like a snake eating its own tail. The picture that it paints is certainly a vain one. This guy saunters out onto a dance floor wearing an apricot scarf, which normally would be found on a woman. He cocks his cap a certain way, strategically. Interesting. He doesn't boogie on the dance floor. He doesn't salsa, waltz, swing, or rock either. He gavottes. He is pretty, prim and proper about it, just like the type of dance the gavotte is. He is looking in the mirror to see how pretty he is. Well hasn't everyone from time to time? And certainly if all the people of the opposite sex wanted to be with you, that would make you feel good, wouldn't it? I certainly would if I had women pursuing me left and right. Sadly, most of my life has not been like that at all, although for a few precious times it has.

So this is a pretty vain cat, whoever he is. Some other aspects of this song interest me as well. For example, She sings "then you flew your Lear jet to Nova Scotia to see a total eclipse of the sun". She means the 1972 July 10 total eclipse of the sun in Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, and Gaspe. I saw that eclipse from Prince Edward Island, but I took the train, not a Lear jet. I wasn't that vain. Besides, a 25-year-old brand new math PhD does not have that kind of money. It got really DARK when I saw that eclipse on Stanhope Beach. I tried to take a picture of it with an Instamatic but it did not come out. I resolved right then and there to see another one with proper equipment.

So I went to Mexico on 1991 July 11 to see it. I had a 4-inch telescope and a camera and took a good photo of that eclipse, the longest in our lives (see My Astronomy Page for my photo of that eclipse). If the Carly Simon song had come out then, it would have said, "took your Lear jet to Cabo San Lucas to see a total eclipse of the sun...".

But talking about my rather huge web site sounds pretty vain in itself, so I will come back to Carly. Some other interesting words in the song are "clouds in my coffee", as though your inner weather is determined by the weather in a cup of holy brown liquid; "some underground spy or the wife of a close friend"; well certainly I would not want to deal with any spy, let alone an underground one; I don't know about the close friend's wife. She said she was quite naïve. Well, everyone is when they are young.

But the thing that really gets me going about this song is that it contradicts itself. She sings, "You're so vain." OK. This guy does sound pretty narcissistic. But then she sings "You think this song is about you, don't you?" She implies by her tone of voice that this song was not written with this vain guy in mind, that it was one of those parts of her life that don't concern him at all. But look again at the lyrics. Just about every word in the song talks about this mystery man. It is about him, isn't it? Isn't it? Isn't it? The song contradicts itself; it is essentially an embellishment of the sentence "This sentence is false."

Besides there is something vain about the idea of writing about a mystery person. It gives you a certain sense of price to know that you sang about a person that nobody knows who it is. I know, for I have written such a song. Go to jimvb.home.mindspring.com/music2002.htm and you will see some of the lyrics of a song I wrote about someone. No, I am not going to tell anyone who this is. In fact, I am displaying only four lines of the lyrics of the song. Perhaps I will tell when Carly Simon tells me who she's singing about.

The Tri-City Tornado of 1993

Storm after storm after storm this spring. At least it wasn't as bad as 10 years ago here. On 1993 August 6 an F4 tornado tore through Old Town Petersburg, Virginia and a Wal-Mart in Colonial Heights causing four deaths and property damage so bad that some of it still hasn't been repaired. The strange thing about this for me is that first of all I was not at work but I was on RDO ("regular day off"); for the people at work, it was "not a RDO", which if you rearrange the letters thereof, you get "tornado". Everyone should have taken that Friday off. In fact, I think it would do this country good if everyone would take every Friday off and do what they feel like doing; make every Friday a SUUSI.

The other strange thing is that I had a dream about tornados two nights previous. Here is the text of part of that dream:

I was in a large parking lot. I was with another group of people, but the lot was nearly empty. There was supposed to have been some sort of workshop (or worship?) here. I had heard earlier of some approaching thunderstorms. Then I heard thunder.

I looked up and saw a threatening sky in front of us, quite black. I did not want to go anywhere, however. We were discussing some sort of deal. "We" consisted of me, Anne, and some friends of ours, and a group of people from elsewhere that we had known earlier. I heard you should go inside in case of tornadoes striking. I tried to keep attention but I turned around and I saw two tornadoes coming out of the blackness. They were small in diameter, frizzly, and as black as the clouds. They came right at us. We did not do anything but wait and see where they would go. They side-swiped us to the right, and I could feel the high wind from them even though they did not strike us headon. The tornadoes also went up in the air slightly. After they left, I saw things were apparently OK. But I saw more tornadoes coming.

It startled me when I had that dream, and then the real thing struck two days later. It came close to the church I went to but did not quite hit it. Predictive dream? At that time even ABC was interested in my story, but they rejected it. I suppose it was because I concluded that the dream was caused not by the tornado of August 6 but by the storms of August 2, which caused four power outages at my house.

But still that tornado devastated the community, especially Petersburg (Wal-Mart came out of it OK - they replaced the destroyed store with a Sams and built an even bigger Wal-Mart a mile down the road) and it gave pause to me - some day this could happen to my house, to me. We are not the master of nature.

The size of hailstones

I have been hearing reports in the media and from NOAA and other weather people about hailstorms. In these reports they describe to us how big they were. They don't say "13 mm" or "1 inch" because most of us don't have a feel for how big that is. Instead, they say things like "golf-ball-sized hail", or "quarter-sized hail". I tried doing a Google&tm; game on that. I Googled for "sized hail". I got these sizes: pea, nickel, quarter, dime, golf ball, tennis ball, baseball, grapefruit, softball, soccer, and volleyball. Volleyball-sized hail? That would really be apocalyptic. Good thing I got no basketball-sized hail.

But what is of more interest to me is the object that people use to compare hail with. Most of the time it is either a monetary coin or a ball from a ball game of some sort. Does the selection of such words reflect our society? Is it mainly interested in money and sports? It would appear that way, when football and basketball stars earn tens of millions of dollars a year. Suppose people were more interested in gardening instead. Then we would see "petunia-sized hail" or "dandelion-sized hail"; something like that. A person in the medical field might say "fingernail-sized hail" or "kneecap-sized hail". The fact that hail is either dime-sized or tennis-ball-sized tells me something about our society. Namely, that we are gaga about moolah and sports.

Anaphylactic Shock

This weekend while running through the woods, I hit a wasp nest and got stung four times. It seems to be OK now but it did hurt at first. The sting puts in a "peptide" which has no lasting effect but it does cause the area to swell at first. My main fear was "anaphylactic shock". I looked this up and found that it was the immune system reacting or overreacting to the attack by the wasps. This can cause much worse problems than the original stings - it can cause shortness of breath and in some cases death. That is why some people when they go out in to the woods must carry an antidote kit with them in case this happens.

When I found out about this, I thought of another case which could be called anaphylactic shock, namely Planeattack, the terrorist attacks of 2001 September 11. They were devastating, especially to some people, but as a whole it just hurt a bit and the nation continued to function after about two months. Sort of like the wasp stings. However, the aftereffects of this attack are still continuing to be fought. There are much tighter restrictions on air travel now. Access to military bases is much stricter. There is a national alert system, and the Patriot Act, which throws a lot of constitutional provisions out the window, was passed. I wonder if this is a case of national anaphylactic shock. I hope not, but certainly the Patriot Act needs to be repealed.

Blogger is weird tonight

When I just tried publishing the blog on trust to my site tonight with Blogger on Internet Explorer, it started going click...click...click... for an infinite number of times. I checked the page and found that the blog had not been published. So I went to Opera. It gave me a weird display with everything huge and few of the buttons I was familiar with. So I quit Opera and went to Netscape. Netscape gave me that same strange display. So I tried posting to it. It gave me a long list of stuff and squawked about some error. To me that tells me that Blogger is going wacky tonight. The first requirement for a blogging system is that it gives me a reasonable display to blog from, and it did not do that tonight, not at any time, not at any place, not with any browser.

Oh finally, I tried Internet Explorer again. This time it clicked twice and then said that my post was successful. So it looks like Blogger came to its senses. But too many of these cuckoo spells and I will be looking for another blogging system.

Trust: interesting article

In this blog before I mentioned that frequently when a politician or other important figure makes a statement, it is false. In fact, I even developed a logic out of it in which the hypothesis are assumed to be false and the conclusion is then to be proven true. An example would be Richard Nixon saying "I am not a crook." I said this means he is a crook.

Today an Leonard Pitts entitled "A matter of trust and the truth" says that this is taking skepticism as a default position. It is assuming that a statement is a lie until proven otherwise. He cites many examples of it including the enduring belief that astronauts really didn't land on the Moon. He says that the Internet makes things worse by letting any blowhard say that anything in the world is false or is a Communist or government plot or CIA plot or something. He even mentions the belief that blue is not blue but is instead a US Government ploy.

If things get this far, trust and communication break down. Each of us has to depend on ourselves, for we can't depend on each other. Mr. Pitts says we need to come back again to a common language and common ground that allows us to disagree and still come together to achieve things collectively.

I say it is more than that. It seems that there have been so many injuries to our sense of trust, including Watergate, statements about weapons of mass destruction, statements about what happened with that intern in the White House office, and so forth that societal trust has broken down. According to The Fourth Turning by Strauss and Howe, a major societal crisis is needed to build a new world order and bring trust back. Perhaps this is what is needed. In the meantime, we will have to do our best to determining what in the media and other high places is true and what is not.

Singing advice causes mondegreens

Last week I attended a workshop on improving my voice quality presented by Amy Carol Webb and learned a lot about how I can improve my speaking and singing voice. It is a matter of opening up the mouth and breathing below the diaphragm. But I heard a tip there that may not work out. I had heard it before. There are certain vowels that one should not sing long on, because they don't sound well. One of these is long e (in English), as in Bees. My instructor said to sing "biii…" with i as in "bin". This reminded me of advice I had received much earlier in a vocal group. Don't sound the vowel "ir" or "r" as in "bird". In other words, sing "gloooooory", not "gloerrrrrrry", which does not sound as well. This improves the vocal quality of a song.

Unfortunately it can also cause trouble. For example, in "I Come From Woman", one of Amy's songs, she sings "women of tears". Following the advice, she does not sing the "er" vowel at the end. But this leads to a mondegreen; that is, a misheard song lyric. She came out singing "women of tease", which is not what she meant at all. When I heard it, it sounded like "women of cheese", which is also not what was intended. In other words, if you alter vowel sounds to make songs sound better, you will be misunderstood. Sometimes, you need to make consonants clear; for example, pronouncing "t" forcefully with the tongue against the teeth. For example, I also heard "Women who pass this course for me." Sounds like cheating, but she really intended "Women who passed the torch for me."

As one can tell from the link on "mondegreen", which by the way is a web site whose name is a mondegreen (www.kissthisguy.com), many, many singers make mondegreens. How can they avoid it? Here's what I say:

1. Make your voice clear - voice from the abdomen, clear pronunciation, and clearly understood vowels.
2. Don't alter a vowel if it will change the meaning. Sometimes you have to sing "teaerrrrrs".
3. Make your voice substantially louder than the instruments or singers who accompany you.
4. Avoid phrases that sound like other phrases. For example, don't sing "the sky", for it sounds like "disguise" and "this guy".
5. Some lyrics don't make sense grammatically or in meaning. Sometimes this is part of being poetic. Imagine Lucy being up in the sky with diamonds. But the meaning of this is so off-beat that the mind wants to find a more usual meaning for it; for instance, "Lucy met this guy; he's dying". If you must sing unusual lyrics, you need to be especially clear, with faint accompaniment.

Hopefully these pointers will prevent future singers from finding their lyrics on www.kissthisguy.com.

Planning a Planeattack

I heard on the news today that terrorists may be planning another planeattack, similar to the Planeattack that occurred on 2001 September 11 claiming 3,000 lives. In my opinion, this is now much less likely to happen, due to changes since the 2001 Planeattack. So what must a terrorist do to conduct a planeattack? There are certain steps and requirements he has to follow, and these have become much harder to crack due to increased security measures and a changed attitude of the public. Here is what he is up against.

First, he has to get some buddies. A single person cannot conduct a planeattack. It's only one of him against the 3 person crew of the airplane. At least five hijackers are required to bring it off. Since any reasonably minded pilot will resist an order to fly the plane into a building, one of the hijackers must take flying lessons. The flying schools are all aware of what happened on 2001/9/11, and they will be suspicious of people wanting to learn how to find jetliners. But suppose one of them can fly the plane. They have to get on the plane with weapons. But they can't use knives or box cutters, because security screeners will now catch them and take them away. They have to use other objects (a camera was mentioned in the news) or even their fists, and that may not be as successful. When they are on the plane and attempt to take it over, they will now face a reinforced cockpit door and much stiffer resistance. The crew will counterattack, and may even have guns, legal or not. A charge of the cockpit may net a bullet hole in the head. The passengers may attack; this has already happened with United 93. Even if they incapacitate the crew and take over the airplane, the plane will fly in a strange direction and air traffic controllers will pick it up, regardless of whether transponders are on or not. And if they start heading for a building, the chances are more likely now than before that a military jet will be there to shoot it down, killing all aboard the plane but saving an entire building of occupants.

For these reasons, I am not concerned that another planeattack will occur. Terrorists ensured that when they conducted the 2001 Planeattack, making the public much more aware of these threats.

Astrology does have its uses

The ancient discipline of astrology claims that the motions of the planets determine the course of our lives. For example, Mercury in opposition is said to cause accidents, and Neptune is said to influence aviation. There is no evidence supporting this, and indeed there is a whole list of personal characteristics of all kinds that have been shown by statistical means to be independent of the Sun sign. So why do people continue to believe in it? Why are there about 20,000 professional astrologers and only 2,000 professional astronomers?

To me it seems that astrology does not have much use. But wait. It does have a use, because people believe in it. For example, the Reagans have been said to use astrology to select propitious times to do things. This means one can use astrology to predict other people's behavior. For example, many people read the horoscope in the morning paper. If you know the Sun sign of someone, and they read the horoscope, you can figure out how they will behave. For example, for today it says for Libra, "Important news reaches you. You're on top of the world. A new endeavor catches your imagination." Libra, according to traditional astrology (but not astronomy!) is Sept 23-Oct 22. If you know someone with one of these birthdays, and you have something important or big to tell them but are waiting for the moment to do so, now may be the time. Also, if you are looking for ideas for a big project, a Libra would be the one to ask today. If that Libra believes in astrology and reads the horoscope page, they may be listening to their imaginations and capturing new ideas more than usual. You might not want to attract people by this method. If a horoscope for Scorpio reads "Possible chance meeting with the person of your life today." and you are a man who knows a woman Scorpio that looks interesting, today would be the day to ask her for the date or to get intimate with her. However, if you do that, you will wind up with a romantic relationship with someone who believes in astrology, which may not be in your best interest.

But one can predict people's behavior by this method, as long as people fall for the non-scientific advice of astrologers. For example, by studying these columns and horoscopes in the 1980s, one could have predicted many of Ronald Reagan's actions and have taken advantage of them.

Clue to speaking success?

I haven't blogged in some time. This is because of several trips, including SUUSI and an astronomy convention in Nashville. In that last trip, however, I think I may have found a clue to a frustration in my life - not being able to win speech contests. In evaluations in Toastmasters, I keep getting things like "mumbled", "too unclear", "could not understand", and so forth. I looked up in Toastmaster manuals to find out more about this. The Speechcraft manual touches on it some. It says that I should keep my mouth open, so that the words can come out clearly. It may say the same in the manual "Your Speaking Voice". But other than that, few if any Toastmasters manuals and almost no evaluations explain why I mumble.

But I found out how at SUUSI, in a workshop entitled "Empowering your Voice" by Amy Carol Webb. Yes, she is a folk singer, and one of the most popular at SUUSI. She told me that the reason why my voice was not coming out is that I don't open my mouth enough. She said to stick three fingers in my mouth. That is how open it should be. I tried it for the rest of the week, and my voice does seem to come out clearer, although not necessarily louder - I find I can do this and speak softly, but it will sound breathy. This is good in some occasions. But will this advice help my public speaking? Hard to say. I will have to try it out on Toastmasters clubs and in the upcoming humorous speech contests.

Of course there are other factors - being prepared, not saying "ah" and the like, and whether the audience considers what I say funny. Further I don't know if this will slow down my talking - evaluators say I talk too fast. I will have to try it out - of course this causes a Hawthorne effect so that I may improve in the other areas too. But I would like to find out if this is the cause of my not winning speech contests. I will have to await what happens.

A Trip to Nashville

I have not been blogging for a while because I have been on the road - first to Charlotte, and now to Nashville. Next week it will be Blacksburg, Virginia. I attended the Astronomical League Convention last week, giving me a big dose of astronomy and a little bit about Nashville. The main points I got out of the convention were that charged coupled device (CCD) astronomy is revolutionizing amateur astronomy, allowing amateur results as good at times as the professionals', light pollution, threatening our view of the night sky for all, and outreach - ensuring that astronomy education reaches our children. Some of the highlights included a trip to the local observatory and a demonstration in which someone made a comet in our meeting room, using dirt, water, and liquid nitrogen.

Googlefeiting

This is the name I give to counterfeiting Google™ search results and putting them on the Net. The idea is this. Suppose you are upset with all these computerized voice menu systems that have been appearing when you call a store on a phone. So you want the user of Google to, when he enters "recognize speech" into Google and hitting the search button, to get "wreck a nice beach", or even "oil spill" instead. Just simply doing it when the user hits search won't work. You get a long column of results that is difficult to replicate. Further, Google determines the results. So you work with the "I'm feeling lucky" button instead. When the user hits that, he gets not a Google listing but the actual page of the number 1 page he would have gotten had he hit search instead. That's the page you can control. So you construct a copy of a Google page that has the entered term "recognize speech" in it, and have it say underneath "do you mean 'wreck a nice beach'". You then put "recognize speech" all over it and ask your friends to link to the page, thus raising its Google score. If your page gets to the number 1 spot, then when the user enters "recognize speech" and presses "I'm feeling lucky", he will get "do you mean 'wreck a nice beach'" instead. That would be funny.

Well it happened. A site called albinodarksheep constructed a page so when you enter "French military victories" and click the "I'm feeling lucky" button, you get "do you mean 'French military defeats'". This morning I read in CNN where now when you enter "weapons of mass destruction" and feel lucky, you get an error page saying that these weapons of mass destruction can't be displayed, and suggesting a number of remedies, such as regime change. This page looks just like a usual "page not found" message, but the wording is all different.

Well now we have a new Google game. Maybe I'll try it some time. Googlefeiting.

Listed

Well, I see that Blogtrek has been listed by another site. If you go to http://www.philocrites.com/ and look at the right column under Unitarian or UU, you will find Blogtrek listed. So it looks like word of Blogtrek is getting out.

Accidents are contradictions

Recently I observed contradictory positions come from two people at my workplace. This continued for a while until a third issue related to both of them caused them to be exposed to each other. Of course the people involved have to revise their positions and the experience can be described as . . . an accident. Which leads me to my sophism of the day: Accidents are contradictions.

A contradiction is a pair of statements that say opposite things; actually it is more than that. Two statements are said to be in contradiction if they both can't be true. For example, "The car was in the garage in Binghamton overnight." and "Mary drove the car to Philadelphia last night." are contradiction: a car can't be in Binghamton and on a highway to Philadelphia at the same time. Logically, a contradiction is any statement S(x, y, …) in logical variables x, y, . . . such that all combinations of truth values (true or false) for the x, y, . . . make S false. An example would be "x and not x." If x is true then not x is false, so that "x and not x" is false. If x is false, then "x and not x" is false. No matter what x is, this statement is false, so it is a contradiction. A collection of statements S, T, … contradict each other if S and T and … is a contradiction, yielding false on every truth-value substitution.

A well-known formula in logic is P -> (not P -> Q). This is logically true for all statements P and Q. It says that once a contradiction occurs (P and not P) then anything goes. Another variant is (P and not P) -> (Q and not Q). This says if you have one contradiction, you have them all. That is a major disaster in a logical theory. If everything is true, then the logical theory tells us nothing. Not even one contradiction can enter into a logical system, else it becomes worthless.

So how is an accident a contradiction? A well known property of physics says that if an object, such as an automobile, is at point (x, y, z) at time t, then no other automobile can be at point (x, y, z) at time t. If an automobile occupies such a point, or rather, it tries to occupy such a point, the result is crash! an accident. Viewed in this way, an automobile accident is simply the results of trying to maintain a contradiction in the positions of cars. It is a contradiction just like the contradiction in the workplace was. The results are not too good.

Fireworks

Last year at this time I ran out into my neighborhood looking for fireworks, as I did in 2001. In both years, Anne worked so that I was by myself. This year she did not work on the fourth so we both walked out into the neighborhood and ran into the most impressive fireworks display I have seen in our neighborhood in some time. They played patriotic music as they lit twirlers from a ladder and shot roman candles into the air. Several times they lit a firework that sent rockets high into the air that exploded in a traditional firework fashion over and over again about a dozen times. It was an impressive display. Like last year, it was hot and humid, but less so than last year.

Some of these shooting fireworks went sideways and one went into the trees. So are these dangerous for people to do? I'd say yes, because these fireworks can shoot sideways at times. It's just the risk that people take to put on a good show. But why not go to a public display to avoid the risks? Because the traffic and parking situations at these public shows are usually horrendous. It can take 30 minutes to leave a fireworks celebration and sometimes hours of waiting around before they begin. These waiting times don't occur at home. So if you want to have people come to these displays rather than set up their own, fix the parking, traffic and waiting problem.

Date Confusion

This is the Age of Confusion. Even though 2000 January 1 has come and gone, and Y2K is no longer an issue, people continue to use two-digit years. Use of two-digit years nearly caused catastrophe last decade. It was only through the tedious and long hours spent by some people correcting reams of two-digit years in code that we averted calamity on that date. The need for four-digit years has not decreased. In fact, it has increased: we are in the age of confusion. As an example, take this sticker , which I got from a recent magazine:

#BXNFPTY *************CR LOT 0152A**R-015
(some bar code)
#0006985895004# ASY EXP 03/04 AT07-A

This was followed by my name and address. First of all, this does not identify the magazine that was sent to me. But more than that, look at the date: 03/04. Should I be concerned? It looks like the subscription has expired - in 2003 April. Or is it 2004 March? There is no way of telling. The month and the year look so much alike that you can't tell them apart. One of the dates says my subscription has expired. The other says it hasn't. I am guessing that it is 2004 March, but I can't be sure. It may even be March 4 or April 3, presumably of the current year. That would say the subscription has expired. One can say that one does not express days in 0 notation; i.e., March 4 would be March 4, not March 04. But some people have said March 04. That can't be done in 2010 and after. March 10 is the tenth of March; use it to mean March 2010 and you set yourself up for a major misunderstanding.

The moral of all this is: continue to use four-digit years. It will solve a lot of problems.

My Experience with Telemarketers

This week a "Do Not Call" list was created listing the names of people who prefer not to be called by telemarketers. These people are to the telephone what spam is to email. There are five ways of communicating, and there is or was junk in all five. The five ways are telephone, with crank calls and telemarketers; US postal service, with junk mail; fax, with junk fax, which was declared illegal a number of years ago; email with spam, and face-to-face. Yes, I have had junk people come to the door selling a variety of products. How do you get rid of them?

Anyway, the Do Not Call list was set up, and the response was tremendous. The site www.donotcall.gov received 1,000 calls a second. At that rate, every household and adult in the United States will be on the list in about two and a half days. The site was made slow by the huge traffic that arrived at it. So what was my experience with telemarketers? About a year ago they got more and more frequent, with frequent hangup calls from "out of area" or from "unavailable". I therefore obtained Call Intercept from Verizon, which intercepts out of area and unavailable calls and makes the caller identify himself before he or she gets answered. That turns off most telemarketers. That is indeed how it worked. The number of telemarketers calling me dropped off to near zero. The only ones I got were those who attempted to get through Call Intercept (there were only one or two), or those who had valid numbers on my caller ID. I found the service too expensive, however, so I dropped it. After that I have still not received many telemarketing calls. About half of them had a valid telephone number on my caller ID. So I will keep Call Intercept off and wait to see if I get more telemarketers. If I do, then I will sign up for the registry.

Library internet filters won't work

Today the Supreme Court said that libraries can be required by law to put Internet filters on their computers to block patrons from viewing "adult" material. I don't think this will work. There appears to be no way a program can distinguish "adult" from non-"adult". Words won't work. Words such as suck, screw, ass, and ball have, in addition to their filterable meanings, other meanings that have absolutely nothing to do with sexual activity, for example. Not even breast or naked will work because these words have non-sexual meanings, for example, the chicken breast. It will instead block access to non-"adult" sites, for example sites on naked-eye astronomy, meaning astronomy without a telescope. These filters want you to have your clothes on, but your telescope has to be on too? Further, knowing these filters are in existence, both legitimate web site owners and porno site owners will change their words to avoid the filters; for example, fcuk, baull and so forth. Our language will be debased and distorted as we will not be able to say screw as in a light bulb any more but will have to say something like smew. Furthermore, filter makers will reconstruct these sites to block these words, and then porno site owners will avoid these blocked words, and so forth. It is just like with spam. Eventually, pornographic web sites will be harmless because they will be 100% gibberish and the pictures will be featureless blurs. And maybe so will all other sites. I agree with people who say that people will not access "adult" sites in a public place, where the neighbor down the street could be watching. Maybe we need to protect children from sexually explicit sites. But we also need to ensure that our language stays clear with words chosen to express a thought of the expresser rather than to avoid a filter. I urge municipalities, state governments, and Congress not to pass laws that would require libraries to install filters.